But I am all in favor of a 'recipe' that consists of "startup does dumb stuff=>Maciej writes a hilarious takedown=>I LOL so hard people ask me what's going on from two rooms away". Can someone implement the API for that, please?
A couple of things in your story seem weird to me, though. Did they really foreclose on your rental house that fast? There were so many properties going under in 2008 that I thought the banks were backed up for months ... Why couldn't you just stay in the rental property until the bank came after it? (PS have you checked to make sure you don't have a deficiency judgment out in your name? Some people are getting charged hundreds of thousands of dollars years after foreclosure!)
Also: you had no credit cards? With most modern credit cards you actually have to call and ask them to stop sending you checks. You could have moved debt from the car to a credit card pretty easily with those, then paid the mere minimum for months.
Did you consider applying for public assistance at all? You could have also tried to barter your skills for housing or food with a church or social service charity.
Again, I'm glad you're okay, and thank you for sharing your story. So many people don't realize they are a lost job or a bad accident away from homelessness; I hope your story encourages more people to save for a rainy day.
Yes, the house foreclosed after 2 missed payments. Bank of America moved quick in my instance. I could have stayed in the house but I also lost my car and my house was very far away from my haunting grounds. Logistically it wouldn't have worked. Plus there's the fact that I couldn't afford utilities (in Texas you need A/C). I have no deficiency judgement as that was all cleared up after I was forced to file Chapter 7.
No, I never believed in credit cards. I always tried to carry a low debt load, at least as much as I can.
Yes I applied for public assistance, but since that year I made a good bit of money on paper I didn't qualify for government assistance. Trust me, I couldn't even get approved for WIC or Texas Lone Star.
I'm glad I was able to share my story with everyone. In America it's very easy to lose everything (and gain it back again).
These days I save as much as possible and live a very frugal existence. That's been my mantra ever since I recovered.
No but I'm necessarily right because I know how a foreclosure works. You don't lose your house after 2 months of non-payment, it takes months and there is a precise legal procedure that has to be complete. Mine was "fast" and it took 9 months.
I haven't experienced one myself, but much of the inquiries about certain facts (including kjackson's) makes me wonder if there were some artistic liberties taken when writing this heartfelt story.
Right-o. From below: "The car was already behind on payments, that part I omitted from the story. As well the house was behind on payments so I let it go to foreclosure. Not the wisest idea, but it happened."
The car was already behind on payments, that part I omitted from the story. As well the house was behind on payments so I let it go to foreclosure. Not the wisest idea, but it happened.
You can get Wordnet through the Wordnik API too ... as well as from the American Heritage Dictionary, The Century Dictionary, Wiktionary, and the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English
And Wordnik is becoming a not-for-profit, if that makes a difference to you. :-)
EVERY word is a "made-up word". Some words were just made up longer ago than others. If you held everyone to this criteria you would severely impoverish language.
It's not that wages would necessarily go up without collusion, it's that the companies would become significantly less productive.
If you can keep your top people from being poached by your peers, you reduce the number of opportunities for them to leave (even if they would leave for much the same salary) and reduce your team churn, increasing productivity.
Increased productivity => MOAR PROFITZ, or so I've been told ...
marginal productivity would set the market wage. Reverse negative productivity is absolute value positive increase in productivity. So, yes...wage would go up absent the collusion...because people will pay out the nose to avoid the loss in productivity. This is why all of those CEOs get paid stupid money...because they can destroy value...not just because the "add it".
There are also many apprenticeships for women in construction/plumbing, because they are 1) good-paying jobs (at least in housing booms) and 2) ones where historically women have been denied apprenticeships/union membership.
Oddly enough, there is also gender imbalance in the fashion industry, but not the way you're thinking of it. Sure, women models make WAY more money than male models, but more top designers are men: (http://www.universityobserver.ie/2012/02/06/gender-imbalance...)
Maybe you should do a little googling before you sound off about the lack of hand-wringing? Maybe it's just you who don't care.
Are you seriously saying that women without children at home having less free time is now somehow society's problem? You don't just "have less free time" automatically. It's probably because you choose to do more housework, which is exactly what the study says ("they spend about six hours more than men doing household work").
Don't want to do it? Cool, practise for a tournament all the time, don't do more housework, and take the risks that come with that. There are tons of lonely male nerds who have untidy houses and excellent tournament records. You are very welcome to join their ranks. In fact they would probably be glad to have more female participation. I on the other hand will err on the side of a more tidy house, and no medals.
The OP was trying to imply that women are naturally worse at the competitions cited, and I pointed out that women in the age demographic that wins those competitions (usually men 20-50) have less free time than the men.
And ... many women don't "want" to do more housework/chores, but feel they have to do it, because if their house is dirty or their kids don't have clean clothes/snacks for the soccer game, etc., it's considered the mom's fault. The dad often gets a free pass. The social pressure makes it a LOT less than a "choice". The social pressure = society's problem. Think about that the next time you see an ad where a woman is shamed because X in her house is less than sparkling, or one where a man is given a free pass to be incompetent at a household chore.
The average woman will catch much more flak for having a dirty house than she will be praised for playing competitive X, even if she's very very very good. And if she's less than very very very good? She's "neglectful" or "selfish."
If I said a guy "chooses" to wear pants instead of a skirt, is it fair to leave out the fact that a guy in skirt will probably face some harassment? There are free choices and not-so-free choices.
And ... please, I don't want to hear "But yardwork!" The grass gets mown 1x/week. The garbage cans go out 1x/week. The dishes, laundry, general tidying? For anything more than 2 people it's every day.
I'm lucky because my spouse does 80% of the housework, because I have a demanding startup job (uh, with time to read HN).
The OP was correct in saying that men are better (he didn't say anything about naturally) at the competitions cited.
And...many men don't want to do chess, coding, or Go competitions, but feel they have to do it, because it is often way of getting any recognition from society, which usually reserves it for actors and football players. Women often get a free pass on account of their looks -- people are naturally nice to even an average-looking woman. An average looking man gets squat. This social pressure = society's problem. Think about that the next time you see an ad that portrays the average dad as an incompetent schlub. For instance, this one -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iymBRSUfz9U
The average man will be treated much worse at a supermarket, a coffee shop, or on the bus, even if he is very very very polite. And if he is less than handsome or wealthy? He's "not really my type", or "ugh, what a creep".
And please, I don't ever want to hear about how you (or your spouse) can't do well at chess or programming because you are busy putting out the trash and doing the dishes in your house. I face the same problems regarding housework, and I am still expected by traditional society, even in the US, to be the breadwinner for my family (which is one of the many reasons I will probably never marry).
I don't think you have been paying attention, or maybe you are hanging out in the wrong places. Have you read "Lean In"?
There are plenty of women out there who don't expect their husbands to be the main breadwinner. Go hang out with med students or lawyers. There are lots of women who would LOVE to be able to concentrate on their careers and have their spouse at home with the kids and making dinner. If "traditional society" is expecting you to do X, go find a "nontraditional society"!
Are you doing PUA techniques at bars as a way to meet women? Then yeah, you are competing on looks and wealth. Are you treating women like people and getting to know them as friends?
You might want to look into CBT, because your comments sound like you have some negative thought patterns that you might want to combat. Thinking that everyone is going to treat you rudely or consider you a creep is a great way to act in defensive ways that ... make people treat you rudely and consider you a creep. :-(
The delta in "Leisure and sports" activities is not caused by the fact that women have "less free time across the board". It is caused by the fact that women choose to engage in other activities.
Women spend 6.61 hours on work + household work + caring for others + shopping, men spend 6.41 hours on it. The delta is 1.4 hours/week, not 5 hours/week.
Women sleep 1.82 hours/week more than men, spend 1.61 hours/week more than men on grooming, and 0.85 hours/week more than men on religious/civic activities. A woman who wanted to become a scrabble champion could easily choose not to do her nails, to wake up earlier and to skip church.
It's okay to be privately surprised, as long as you think about WHY you're surprised (e.g. "girls don't code" vs. "there aren't as many women coders as you might expect given the # of women in the US"). The dick move is to belabor the point and treat the programming woman as a performing dog instead of a person.
Think of it this way: you meet a woman at a meetup about a technical topic, and you find you have projects/interests in common. If you spend the whole conversation interrogating her about how/why she learned to code, asking her questions about what her boyfriend/significant other/husband does or what he thinks about her coding, or asking for her "feminine opinion" on your consumer startup, you are a dick.
If you treat her as a PERSON, not a novelty, and talk about those interests that are relevant to the meetup, that's decent behavior.
> The dick move is to belabor the point and treat the programming woman as a performing dog instead of a person.
Sure, but that's basically saying that "being a dick is being a dick." You could also be a dick by treating a world-class athlete as a performing dog. You can be a dick about anything, regardless of how unoffensive that thing is on its own. But that's not what the original statement was talking about. It explicitly said that considering it noteworthy or surprising is inherently bad.
Yeah, I was wrong in the severity of the statement. What I can say that it could offend, since it has (at least for me). As always, you may be sufficiently tactful in person to avoid the whole issue.
But I am all in favor of a 'recipe' that consists of "startup does dumb stuff=>Maciej writes a hilarious takedown=>I LOL so hard people ask me what's going on from two rooms away". Can someone implement the API for that, please?